The Gordian Knot Group needs some help from the choir. As part of the Underwriter Certification program, every household within 35 kilometers of a plant will be sent a release package. Here's the draft cover letter which would go with the package.
These were my thoughts also, after a very brief reading, like I think most people will take from it. The mongers of fear will pounce on it, maybe add a mushroom cloud in the middle of that map. Mock the compensation scheme - How much is your child worth?
I do understand Jack's worry, however. If we allow the public to think "everything is now perfectly safe" there will be another Three Mile Island, and nuclear power will be set back another 20 years. We've got to get the public educated first, then get the plants approved, then give them a realistic assessment of the dangers.
How do we educate the public? We've got to reach out to journalists, especially the ones now wailing about climate change. What do these journalists need - a clear, well-organized source of the facts and a summary of the best arguments pro and con on any remaining issue.
It is important that the source be trusted. World Nuclear Association's Information Library is excellent, but perceived as one-sided. Wikipedia is perceived as neutral, but is actually anti-nuclear. Citizendium is what Wikipedia should have been. We just need more help in working with these journalists. https://citizendium.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_reconsidered
I have a few comments. I agree with Roger in that it is very difficult to discuss risk with people, especially regarding cancer, which is very unlikely to happen from external radiation exposure compared to other toxins and oxygen respiration causes:
1. Page 4 replace "alpha particles and electrons" with "alpha and electron-emitting particles". This may sound like a small issue, but it is the molecules that radiate from within the body that are imposing, not the alpha and electron particles themselves being ingested or inhaled.
2. Page 5, ROSs are most known to people as "free radicals". You might mention that.
3. Page 5, para 4 - This gives the impression that radiation is a major, or only, cause of cancer when, in fact, it is a very weak carcinogen compared to other stressors. You should mention that there are other, more potent carcinogens we are concerned with and radiation is among the weakest of these.
4. Page 6, para 3. While you bounce around this topic, there are too many references to "the more the dose, the more the cancer". This is not necessarily true. The main cause of cancer from radiation is the dose rate first, not the cumulative dose. So, more dose rate will cause cancer before more dose will cause cancer. This is one of the nuances that make discussing risk with people a tricky business.
5. Page 8, number 1. When staying indoors, there should be no exchange of outside air, so it is important to stress that windows and doors stay closed and the air conditioning and heating systems stay off, if possible.
6. I disagree with supplying KI tablets in the emergency kit. It usually causes more damage to health to allow people to self-medicate with KI. Only health organizations should be distributing and advising people with KI. Most Americans have a very healthy amount of normal iodine in their diet. The trouble (one of them) with Russian children was that their diets were deficient in iodine. The thyroid will cause any excess iodine to be excreted, so if there is enough iodine in the thyroid, radioactive iodine is not a concern. The thyroid is much more radio-resistant than other organs. Also, since cells are dividing more quickly in developing children (much more in a fetus), repair mechanisms are not as robust since the cell divides faster. For these reasons, I would not advise supplying KI tablets and allowing people to self-medicate. If they buy their own, God bless them, but the "cure" can be worse than the disease in the case of KI very easily. See here: https://remm.hhs.gov/potassiumiodide.htm. Admonishing them to get "clean" milk is good and is one of the first thing emergency responders do if there is a suspected fission product release, whether from a reactor accident (very unimposing) or a nuclear blast (much more imposing).
7. When I was on radiological response teams, our public admonition was to "get in and stay in". We decided is was not productive to explain health physics details to the public. If they avoid the outside air for 3 days, the dose rates reduce by 1000 times in the plume. That is why 3 days of emergency food and water is recommended for each home. If people did this, there would be very few problems related to health physics, even in a nuclear explosion. Staying in the middle of the house, or in a basement, if available, is a good thing to include, which your diagram shows.
What do you want the people this pamphlet is addressed to think or do? As it stands, I expect it to increase the intensity of radiation fear. The assumption behind the pamphlet seems to be that people are rational actors. Kahneman and Tversky showed this assumption was false decades ago. I believe the tone needs to be different. An excellent manual for getting the results you want is Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss.
I want them to not panic in a release. I want them to handle a release in a non-disruptive fashion. I want them to not be emotionally scarred by a release.
K and T did not show that people are irrational. They showed that in some rather contrived situations people violated expected utility theory. IOW people are more complicated than expected utility claimed. But they can learn.
I gather from the last two sentences we need to show more empathy. Is that what you are suggesting? If so, the only way I can see to do that is one on one meetings with the families,
Could get expensive but maybe it's worth it. We could make the offer in the cover letter.
Most, if not all, nuclear power plants in the US already have such information available and mail it out annually to residents inside the affected areas. They contain most if not all the information you describe in simple, easy to understand language. I received it, for years, living inside the Emergency Planning Zones near two different plants.
For specific examples for Diablo Canyon in CA see:
It is the same as for many controlled substances in that "dose makes the poison". Here is a web site that gives a general summary, but you can find many. I do not think it will kill you, and most people will probably not have a problem, but there is very little benefit, so why take the risk? https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/emergencies/ki.htm. Also, most internet sources will not be made as safely as those from a pharmacy. As far as I know, you need a prescription to get them at a pharmacy. In short, it is not a good idea to use them as a prophylaxes, which many people would do; "if one is good, 10 must be better", so to speak.
My reaction is - it is way too scary for the public and in any case who would even remember where they had put the package if they needed it. I also question your risk estimate. I know a Three-mile Island type incident is probable but even that did no detectible harm. And, for people who live a particular distance and direction from a release, the wind will determine if anything comes their way, hence reducing their particular risk. People do not need to worry even if they live close to a plant.
My other concern is that information like this must come from a trusted source if it is to be believed. It is not enough just to be correct.
I suspect most of us in the "choir" have some understanding what radiation really is and what are the real risks. But few of the population do, and I believe the suggested message would scare the hell out of them. They will immediately become the worst enemies of placing a reactor facility anywhere near.
Jack is right that we should not claim there will be no failures. What we can claim is that, except for Chernobyl, the four big failures (3x at Fukushima, plus TMI) hurt essentially no one. We can also claim that we learn from failures, just like other hazardous enterprises like air travel. Over time, we get better and better, and both the failure probabilities and the consequences of failures decrease.
Another good way to state this is - ALL the big failures were due to meltdown. Meltdown is impossible in the new designs. That does not eliminate ALL possible failures, but the failures that will occur, should result in little if any radiation release, certainly less than Fukushima. THEN go on to describe some possible failures. FOLLOW UP when some overly enthusiastic supporters say there is NO possibility of failure. Trust is hard to regain, once lost.
Chernobyl was not a meltdown in the sense that you are using it. It was a reactivity excursion after the reactor was put in an unstable state. It is next to impossible to put a standard light water reactor in an unstable state. This is less true for some of the non-light water technologies. The reactivity coefficients are not as negative. There are no solutions; only trade offs.
In any event, what we are discussing here are instructions about what to do IF we have a release. One goal is to prevent panicked reactions and evacuations which do far more harm than the release itself. The other goal is that by showing releases are tolerable we make nuclear power insurable which makes Underwriter Certification feasible.
Much of the Chernobyl damage was molten fuel. Calling it a meltdown may not be technically precise, but calling it something else might be confusing to more people. What we are talking about is "core damage accidents with releases". Perhaps there is another correct overarching phrase, but my proposal here would mostly confuse people. You are correct that the public needs to understand that accident releases will happen rarely, but that they are also benign enough that people should decide on their own self-protection measures with good knowledge of consequences to them and others. This level of public education will be a real challenge.
Although we can predict that occurrences of releases are rare or very rare, regulators did not predict the TMI release. Ironically, the WASH-1400 report a few years before did identify a small break LOCA as being an important contributor to overall risk. TMI was such a leak.
I know of no major upset that was in the plant's PRA. In the Flop book, I offered to bet $10,000 even money that next significant release involves a chain of events that was not in the plant's Probabilistic Risk Analysis event tree. That was 4 years ago. So far no takers.
Since the overwhelming harm from a nuclear event is psychological damage, I would add a few short sentences assuring people that famous past radiological events weren't harmful to the public. That the average dose-rate at TMI was less than one chest X-ray (the rate in this case is "one TMI" :) and that no one was sickened, injured, or killed by radiation at Fukushima. And that no reactors like Chernobyl even exist in the US.
Be a little careful with that last statement. It's true now., but it wasn't always true.. We built 8 graphite moderated, water cooled plutonium production reactors at Hanford. They had the same problem as the RBMK. General Groves said he expected to be woken up one night with the news that one of them had gone boom. That's why he spread them well apart along the Columbia. He wanted to keep the Pu flowing if that happened. As it turned out, they operated for about 25 years without a major incident.
More to the point, war could result in a Chernobyl like release. If such releases are truly intolerable then nuclear power is off the table. Fortunately, we have detected no harm to the public from radiation at Chernobyl other than an increase in childhood thyroid cancer, which could easily have been prevented by not allowing the kids to drink I-131 contaminated milk.
Hey, thanks for the info on Hanford! I could amend the statement to say that no Chernobyl type reactors are operating in the US.
Aside from that, I think it would be important to include some perspective and assurance in your proposed pamphlet. Particularly since the greatest harm
to humans from TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima was the "fallout" from nuclear fear. So it would be a great help to anyone reading the pamphlet to know that TMI and Fuku were essentially radiation nothing-burgers, and that we have no operating Chernobyl type reactors. Quelling the fear that springs from past misinformation (and disinformation) may well be one of the best health benefits the pamphlet could provide.
The regulators need to identify under what conditions actual human harm will occur. This might take various forms: (1) external radiation dose, (2) specific radioisotope ingestions, etc. I think jack argues that a realistic risk-based standard reimbursement method be developed that would take lawsuits with ridiculously-scaled damages impossible, to be replaced by actual science-based damage assessments.
I am afraid this approach would be counter-productive in that it would bring up risks that no one actually needs to think about.
These were my thoughts also, after a very brief reading, like I think most people will take from it. The mongers of fear will pounce on it, maybe add a mushroom cloud in the middle of that map. Mock the compensation scheme - How much is your child worth?
I do understand Jack's worry, however. If we allow the public to think "everything is now perfectly safe" there will be another Three Mile Island, and nuclear power will be set back another 20 years. We've got to get the public educated first, then get the plants approved, then give them a realistic assessment of the dangers.
How do we educate the public? We've got to reach out to journalists, especially the ones now wailing about climate change. What do these journalists need - a clear, well-organized source of the facts and a summary of the best arguments pro and con on any remaining issue.
It is important that the source be trusted. World Nuclear Association's Information Library is excellent, but perceived as one-sided. Wikipedia is perceived as neutral, but is actually anti-nuclear. Citizendium is what Wikipedia should have been. We just need more help in working with these journalists. https://citizendium.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_reconsidered
I have a few comments. I agree with Roger in that it is very difficult to discuss risk with people, especially regarding cancer, which is very unlikely to happen from external radiation exposure compared to other toxins and oxygen respiration causes:
1. Page 4 replace "alpha particles and electrons" with "alpha and electron-emitting particles". This may sound like a small issue, but it is the molecules that radiate from within the body that are imposing, not the alpha and electron particles themselves being ingested or inhaled.
2. Page 5, ROSs are most known to people as "free radicals". You might mention that.
3. Page 5, para 4 - This gives the impression that radiation is a major, or only, cause of cancer when, in fact, it is a very weak carcinogen compared to other stressors. You should mention that there are other, more potent carcinogens we are concerned with and radiation is among the weakest of these.
4. Page 6, para 3. While you bounce around this topic, there are too many references to "the more the dose, the more the cancer". This is not necessarily true. The main cause of cancer from radiation is the dose rate first, not the cumulative dose. So, more dose rate will cause cancer before more dose will cause cancer. This is one of the nuances that make discussing risk with people a tricky business.
5. Page 8, number 1. When staying indoors, there should be no exchange of outside air, so it is important to stress that windows and doors stay closed and the air conditioning and heating systems stay off, if possible.
6. I disagree with supplying KI tablets in the emergency kit. It usually causes more damage to health to allow people to self-medicate with KI. Only health organizations should be distributing and advising people with KI. Most Americans have a very healthy amount of normal iodine in their diet. The trouble (one of them) with Russian children was that their diets were deficient in iodine. The thyroid will cause any excess iodine to be excreted, so if there is enough iodine in the thyroid, radioactive iodine is not a concern. The thyroid is much more radio-resistant than other organs. Also, since cells are dividing more quickly in developing children (much more in a fetus), repair mechanisms are not as robust since the cell divides faster. For these reasons, I would not advise supplying KI tablets and allowing people to self-medicate. If they buy their own, God bless them, but the "cure" can be worse than the disease in the case of KI very easily. See here: https://remm.hhs.gov/potassiumiodide.htm. Admonishing them to get "clean" milk is good and is one of the first thing emergency responders do if there is a suspected fission product release, whether from a reactor accident (very unimposing) or a nuclear blast (much more imposing).
7. When I was on radiological response teams, our public admonition was to "get in and stay in". We decided is was not productive to explain health physics details to the public. If they avoid the outside air for 3 days, the dose rates reduce by 1000 times in the plume. That is why 3 days of emergency food and water is recommended for each home. If people did this, there would be very few problems related to health physics, even in a nuclear explosion. Staying in the middle of the house, or in a basement, if available, is a good thing to include, which your diagram shows.
Steven,
Some good points. What specifically is the health risk from taking the KI pills?
This is beyond the scope of a draft but in the long run I would confine my comments to recommending it to be focus group tested on mothers
Actually I think I can recommend A-B testing on ChatGPT pretending to be a mother
What do you want the people this pamphlet is addressed to think or do? As it stands, I expect it to increase the intensity of radiation fear. The assumption behind the pamphlet seems to be that people are rational actors. Kahneman and Tversky showed this assumption was false decades ago. I believe the tone needs to be different. An excellent manual for getting the results you want is Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss.
George,
I want them to not panic in a release. I want them to handle a release in a non-disruptive fashion. I want them to not be emotionally scarred by a release.
K and T did not show that people are irrational. They showed that in some rather contrived situations people violated expected utility theory. IOW people are more complicated than expected utility claimed. But they can learn.
I gather from the last two sentences we need to show more empathy. Is that what you are suggesting? If so, the only way I can see to do that is one on one meetings with the families,
Could get expensive but maybe it's worth it. We could make the offer in the cover letter.
Most, if not all, nuclear power plants in the US already have such information available and mail it out annually to residents inside the affected areas. They contain most if not all the information you describe in simple, easy to understand language. I received it, for years, living inside the Emergency Planning Zones near two different plants.
For specific examples for Diablo Canyon in CA see:
https://www.prepareslo.org/en/emergency-planning-zone-information.aspx
and
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiAoonYjOODAxW3MzQIHfYmDnQQFnoECCoQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pge.com%2Fassets%2Fpge%2Fdocs%2Fabout%2Fpge-systems%2Femergency-planning-brochure.pdf.html&usg=AOvVaw3XAE7YfJDKjWdIoQu0sOh6&opi=89978449
(for the second link the info will auto-download and open when you go there)
Mike,
Thanks. The brochures are far more reasonable (and better written) than I would have expected. We can learn from them.
It is the same as for many controlled substances in that "dose makes the poison". Here is a web site that gives a general summary, but you can find many. I do not think it will kill you, and most people will probably not have a problem, but there is very little benefit, so why take the risk? https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/emergencies/ki.htm. Also, most internet sources will not be made as safely as those from a pharmacy. As far as I know, you need a prescription to get them at a pharmacy. In short, it is not a good idea to use them as a prophylaxes, which many people would do; "if one is good, 10 must be better", so to speak.
My reaction is - it is way too scary for the public and in any case who would even remember where they had put the package if they needed it. I also question your risk estimate. I know a Three-mile Island type incident is probable but even that did no detectible harm. And, for people who live a particular distance and direction from a release, the wind will determine if anything comes their way, hence reducing their particular risk. People do not need to worry even if they live close to a plant.
My other concern is that information like this must come from a trusted source if it is to be believed. It is not enough just to be correct.
I suspect most of us in the "choir" have some understanding what radiation really is and what are the real risks. But few of the population do, and I believe the suggested message would scare the hell out of them. They will immediately become the worst enemies of placing a reactor facility anywhere near.
Jack is right that we should not claim there will be no failures. What we can claim is that, except for Chernobyl, the four big failures (3x at Fukushima, plus TMI) hurt essentially no one. We can also claim that we learn from failures, just like other hazardous enterprises like air travel. Over time, we get better and better, and both the failure probabilities and the consequences of failures decrease.
Another good way to state this is - ALL the big failures were due to meltdown. Meltdown is impossible in the new designs. That does not eliminate ALL possible failures, but the failures that will occur, should result in little if any radiation release, certainly less than Fukushima. THEN go on to describe some possible failures. FOLLOW UP when some overly enthusiastic supporters say there is NO possibility of failure. Trust is hard to regain, once lost.
David,
Chernobyl was not a meltdown in the sense that you are using it. It was a reactivity excursion after the reactor was put in an unstable state. It is next to impossible to put a standard light water reactor in an unstable state. This is less true for some of the non-light water technologies. The reactivity coefficients are not as negative. There are no solutions; only trade offs.
In any event, what we are discussing here are instructions about what to do IF we have a release. One goal is to prevent panicked reactions and evacuations which do far more harm than the release itself. The other goal is that by showing releases are tolerable we make nuclear power insurable which makes Underwriter Certification feasible.
Much of the Chernobyl damage was molten fuel. Calling it a meltdown may not be technically precise, but calling it something else might be confusing to more people. What we are talking about is "core damage accidents with releases". Perhaps there is another correct overarching phrase, but my proposal here would mostly confuse people. You are correct that the public needs to understand that accident releases will happen rarely, but that they are also benign enough that people should decide on their own self-protection measures with good knowledge of consequences to them and others. This level of public education will be a real challenge.
Although we can predict that occurrences of releases are rare or very rare, regulators did not predict the TMI release. Ironically, the WASH-1400 report a few years before did identify a small break LOCA as being an important contributor to overall risk. TMI was such a leak.
Roger,
I know of no major upset that was in the plant's PRA. In the Flop book, I offered to bet $10,000 even money that next significant release involves a chain of events that was not in the plant's Probabilistic Risk Analysis event tree. That was 4 years ago. So far no takers.
I wouldn't take it either. In safety conscious industries, no two disasters are alike.
Since the overwhelming harm from a nuclear event is psychological damage, I would add a few short sentences assuring people that famous past radiological events weren't harmful to the public. That the average dose-rate at TMI was less than one chest X-ray (the rate in this case is "one TMI" :) and that no one was sickened, injured, or killed by radiation at Fukushima. And that no reactors like Chernobyl even exist in the US.
Mike,
Be a little careful with that last statement. It's true now., but it wasn't always true.. We built 8 graphite moderated, water cooled plutonium production reactors at Hanford. They had the same problem as the RBMK. General Groves said he expected to be woken up one night with the news that one of them had gone boom. That's why he spread them well apart along the Columbia. He wanted to keep the Pu flowing if that happened. As it turned out, they operated for about 25 years without a major incident.
More to the point, war could result in a Chernobyl like release. If such releases are truly intolerable then nuclear power is off the table. Fortunately, we have detected no harm to the public from radiation at Chernobyl other than an increase in childhood thyroid cancer, which could easily have been prevented by not allowing the kids to drink I-131 contaminated milk.
Hey, thanks for the info on Hanford! I could amend the statement to say that no Chernobyl type reactors are operating in the US.
Aside from that, I think it would be important to include some perspective and assurance in your proposed pamphlet. Particularly since the greatest harm
to humans from TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima was the "fallout" from nuclear fear. So it would be a great help to anyone reading the pamphlet to know that TMI and Fuku were essentially radiation nothing-burgers, and that we have no operating Chernobyl type reactors. Quelling the fear that springs from past misinformation (and disinformation) may well be one of the best health benefits the pamphlet could provide.
The regulators need to identify under what conditions actual human harm will occur. This might take various forms: (1) external radiation dose, (2) specific radioisotope ingestions, etc. I think jack argues that a realistic risk-based standard reimbursement method be developed that would take lawsuits with ridiculously-scaled damages impossible, to be replaced by actual science-based damage assessments.